In a typical retail facility, a store clerk's main role is to aid customers in making a purchasing decision. In most occasions, a customer enters a retail facility with only a vague idea of an item that the individual wants to purchase. The store clerk encountering such a customer has the task of asking questions that will help clarify features that the customer wants in the item, as well as features that the customer does not want. The store clerk then makes recommendations based on the customer's responses.
The customer, however, sometimes has difficulty articulating the features that he or she likes, often realizing that a feature is to the customer's liking after the individual actually sees, feels, and/or experiences the feature embodied in a particular item. Thus, customers many times roam the store in hopes of finding items that suit their tastes. Customers might then select several of such items for a closer inspection prior to purchasing.
In a clothing retail facility, the customer actually tries on the selected items. Thus, a store clerk assisting the customer can keep track of the items being selected for fitting, and make general inferences about the features the customer desires. The store clerk may then make recommendations on similar, alternative, or additional merchandises that the customer might like.
The described method of customer assistance, especially in a clothing retail store environment, has several drawbacks. First, a store clerk must remember a customer's face and the items chosen by the customer, as well as the fitting room number in which he or she is trying on the items. If a store clerk is not able to remember such details, the clerk will write down the information on paper. However, having a paper and pen/pencil constantly at hand is an added burden to the store clerk.
Second, in a retail store where the number of salespeople is limited, one store clerk might have to assist more than one customer at a time. This provides additional stress to the store clerk's ability to match customers with the items selected and the fitting rooms being utilized. When the number of customers substantially outnumber the number of salespeople, some customers are ultimately left with inadequate, or no assistance at all.
Even if a store clerk becomes available to assist a customer currently being assisted by a first store clerk, no efficient method exists for the first store clerk to share information about the customer in the fitting room (e.g., information on the items that the customer has tried on so far). Consequently, the first store clerk cannot be efficiently replaced by another store clerk. Without such an efficient method of sharing information, shifting of store clerks becomes unproductive, especially when the first clerk has a significant amount of information to share, such as information about the customer's preferences, tastes, and shopping habits, that have been accumulated through regular dealings with the customer.
Another drawback to the above-described method of customer assistance is that the quality of the assistance is highly dependent on the store clerk's expertise and knowledge of items in the store. For instance, even the most experienced store clerk might at times forget that an item exists in the store that matches a customer's preference, resulting in a loss to both the customer and the retailer if the item would have been purchased by the customer had it been recommended by the store clerk.
Accordingly, there is a need for a system and method for tracking and recognizing merchandise items carried into a fitting room by a customer for further data processing. Such system should display the fitting room number being utilized by a particular customer on an in-store display terminal accessible to a store clerk. The system should further display information on the items being tried on, such as the number of such items, their style, brand, color, and price. In addition, the system should process the style, brand, color, and price data of the items in the fitting room, and provide recommendations of other items consistent with the analyzed data. When used in combination with a customer identification card, the recommendations provided by the system should also be consistent with the customer's profile information.